Red Tape

DOCUMENTS DECIDE EVERYTHING

By Stephen Wilson

 

Despite some promises by the Ministry of Education and Science to cut down excessive  paperwork which Russian school teachers perform, red tape and testing have been rising over the last two decades. Petitions, pickets and protests by school teachers are yet to make a significant  impact!

 

'My mother is a teacher of primary school children. She always sat with school notebooks until deep into the night. After ten years when I went to the institute my mother no longer brought back home school notebooks but huge folders with documents. She did not complain about difficult pupils but about endless records and tests. At the start, filling in forms for reports occupied 30% of her time, then 40% and afterwards 60%. Before all this checking mother did not sleep at night for a month  in order to fill in forms,' stated Victoria Mikisha in a recent article in Novaya Gazeta, Number 139,18.12.2020.

 

During the Covid 19 crisis since the beginning of Spring, paperwork has been rising. Russian school teachers have been expected to undertake more medical tests, do first aid courses, keep new attendance records not only on paper but electronically and to take exams to test their proficiency in their own subjects. They are also being distracted by new courses on methodology which in many ways hinders rather than helps their teaching. This mounting paper work not only affects school teachers but practically all teachers at further educational institutes. At the Institute of Power and Energy in Moscow some teachers were bemused to  hear that they should dispense with all the tables to create more free space between students and teachers. One teacher asked, "Where are we going to put our own textbooks?" Such notions were fashionable in the late 1990's in Britain and America partly reflecting the idea of paperless open space business offices. It did not work. Office workers deserted their offices taking their laptops to Star-bucks where they felt comfortable with the tables on offer there. But English teachers are obliged to write academic articles in order to bolster the prestige of this institute. However, instead of the teachers being paid for those articles,they have to pay for getting the articles published ! Shouldn't it be vice versa? It is equivalent to taking a pay cut. Most teachers I have spoken find this obligation not only irrelevant to their jobs but an unwanted distraction. Does anyone even really read those articles that get published? Who on earth benefits from those articles? Certainly not the teachers !  

 

It has been estimated that school teachers waste 7 to 13 hours of their time a week preparing not only special tests but on drawing up reports about them. One of the most controversial demands made by Rosobrnadzor  is the All Russian control/testing work.School teachers are asked to rigorously  test the knowledge of all school students in subjects. This not only gets on the nerves of teachers but has an adverse impact on the stress of school students. While Rosobrnadzor claims that such tests boosts the performance and ratings of school students, in say,International surveys known as PISA, teachers argue they are irrelevant and wasting time they could devote to genuinely helping school students with problems. The Ministry of Education and Science have made a recent announcement that they intend to cut down this paperwork by stating that teachers will only be required to complete 4 documents once a month. Cynical teachers answer that those 4 documents will be filled with 60 pages or more! They deeply distrust anything officials announce! School students also feel the brunt of all this excessive paper work and testing. If a teacher gives them a low mark which is inexplicable it is harder to contact the teacher. The teachers have become more inaccessible. Keeping the attendance records of say, a class of 30 to 60 students who are doing On-line courses can also be impossible. A teacher might spend hours of his or her  time attempting to track down a student who never turned up in class or vanished into thin air!

 

Some teachers have gone on pickets ,protests and written letters calling for the cancellation of the All Russian Control work. There are unconfirmed rumors and hearsay that the Department of Education and Science sent to Moscow schools a questionnaire which asks about the political views of school teachers, whether they take part in protest demonstrations and if they discuss their political views with their pupils. The questionnaire is supposed to be drawn up by 'sociologists,' but to many teachers it seems to have sinister connotations. Whether such a questionnaire actually exists and was distributed the mere rumor of it may be designed to frighten school teachers into refraining from openly expressing political views or taking part in any political activity at odds with the government.

 

The future perspectives suggest that red tape will rise rather than decline. In 2020, doing the All-Russian test/control work became obligatory for pupils from the 4th to the 7th grade. In 2021, such testing is to be made compulsory for all pupils of the 8th grade. What was once optional and at the discretion of an individual school has been rendered compulsory. It seems that teachers will be paying more and more attention to paper rather than pupils. And the teachers who test pupils will also be subjected to tests. And what will teachers be tested on? Yes, you have already guessed, 'How competent are they at testing pupils?